Friday, October 17, 2008

Sports Talk Radio

Sports talk radio, in general, is not where you go for the most sophisticated conversation on your radio dial. I'm sure we all know that. Like all radio some of it is better than others. ESPN has some syndicated shows and some of them provide some nice analysis of what's going on in the sports world. It's similar to what you see on your television before each Sunday's NFL games. On ESPN you get some real good analysis by knowledgeable hosts. If you flip over to Fox you get Terry Bradshaw and the gang yelling at each and acting like a cage full of monkeys. I imagine it won't be that long before they start throwing poo at each other.

Yesterday, during the nine o'clock hour, I tuned into AM station 610, WFNZ. Get it? FNZ? Fans! Fans of what? Sports! Why did I tune into WFNZ? Because my local NPR station was having a show about something I wasn't all that interested in so I figured why not see what is happening on the local sports talk station.

Holy crap, what a bunch of crap. First of all I have never heard such a liberal use of soundbites. Every comment a host made was accompanied by a sound effect or a piece of dialog from Homer Simpson, Arnold or the Seinfeld television show. They did actually spend five minutes discussing the amazing coincidence of one of them referring to a specific Seinfeld episode the day before and watching seeing it in syndication that evening.

They laughed at their own jokes constantly. It was like combining John Boy and Billy with the Car Guys on NPR and then taking that monster and hitting it over the head with a baseball for an hour before allowing it on the air. At one point one of the hosts said that Charlotte Bobcat player, Adam Morrison looks like Paul Poundstone with a mustache. Boy, did the monkey cage shake with hilarity when that bomb was dropped.

Following the Seinfeld segment they went into an analysis of the upcoming New Orleans Saints/Carolina Panthers football. This analysis consisted of the listing of the Saints' third down conversion statistics so far this year. It was implied that these stats were scary if you were a Panthers fan and, of course, this was accompanied by a soundbite of a horror movie type scream.

Sometimes you need to be reminded why you never turn your radio away from your local NPR station.

Tomorrow Never Knows

"Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start."

Or how about this one: "The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same."